Henry and Thomas rapidly became fast friends. Henry may have seen in his chancellor a surrogate father. Thomas was 13-15 years older than Henry, about the same age as Henry’s own father, Geoffrey Plantagenet count of Anjou, who had died three years before Henry became king. Thomas certainly threw himself wholeheartedly into the role of adviser and companion to the king, to such an extent that his critics have sometimes accused him of betraying Archbishop Theobald just as, in their eyes, he later betrayed the king. The reason for this accusation is that it is sensible to assume that Theobald had more in mind than the restoration of good government in England when he sent Thomas off to become Henry’s chancellor. He probably hoped that Thomas would be a spokesman for the interests of the church in the heart of the king’s household. If so, he must have been disappointed because, at those points where the king’s interests did not seem to run directly with those of the church, Thomas supported Henry without apparent qualm, sometimes even taking the lead in measures that the church saw as against its interests. Thomas’s defenders see these actions as attempts to maintain a balance between the interests of the church and the interests of the state.
Younger Husbands and Older Wives
Most royal and aristocratic marriages in the Middle Ages were arranged to advance the interests of the families of the spouses. Love, compatibility, and even age were not important considerations. Both Henry II's father and Henry himself married women who were considerably older than they were.
Geoffrey count of Anjou (Henry II's father) and Matilda were married in 1128, when Geoffrey was only 15 years old. Matilda, who was then 26, was
Already a widow: in 1114, when only 12 herself, she had become the second wife of Emperor Henry V, but she bore him no children. After Henry V died in 1125, Matilda's father, Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy, arranged for her to marry the young count of Anjou in order to forge an alliance with the ruler of this area that had long been a competitor and enemy of the duchy of Normandy.
Before he ascended to the throne of England, Henry of Anjou married Eleanor duchess of Aquitaine in 1152, when he was 19 and she was about 30. Eleanor had been married to Louis VII of France since 1137 and had given him two daughters. Louis, however, wanted sons, and he and Eleanor did not get along at all. With permission of the pope, the marriage was annulled in 1152 on grounds of consanguinity—that is, that Louis and Eleanor were too closely related to have married in the first place. Consanguinity was an often-used excuse for dissolving marriages in an era when the church believed strongly that marriage was for life. That, however, left Eleanor in a predicament. As duchess of Aquitaine she was the greatest prize on the twelfth-century marriage market. Any enterprising man who could kidnap her and force her into marriage would thereby come into control of a significant portion of the kingdom of France. Indeed, the tale is told that, on her progress back from Paris to the capital of Aquitaine, Bordeaux, at least two French lords attempted the feat. For this reason among others, Eleanor had prearranged with Henry, whom she had probably met only once, to marry him as soon as she was free of her first marriage. Although they were at least as closely related as Eleanor and her first husband, they were married a bare eight weeks after Eleanor's first marriage was annulled.
Though Geoffrey and Matilda had three sons in three and a half years, and Henry and Eleanor had at least five sons and three daughters, both marriages were, perhaps not surprisingly, famously unhappy. After the birth of their third son, Geoffrey and Matilda spent very little time together. Eleanor went so far as to support the revolt of her sons against their father in 1173-74. As a result, Henry threw her into prison and kept her there until his death in 1189. The play The Lion in Winter, by James Goldman, produced on Broadway in 1966 and made into a movie in 1968 and a television film in 2003, depicts, in somewhat heightened form, the relations among Henry, Eleanor, their sons, and the young King Philip II of France in the aftermath of the sons' revolt against Henry. Matilda survived Geoffrey by 15 years, and Eleanor survived Henry by an equal period.
World History
